In this presentation, Allison Stern, co‑founder and head of marketing & sales at Tubular Labs, outlines three stages of startup sales—hustle, process/standardization, and growth—positioning Tubular as currently transitioning from hustle to process. She describes Tubular’s core product: a video intelligence service that aggregates a massive database of video content (over a billion videos) and viewer behavior (tracking ~200 million users), providing granular insights for media companies, brands, and creators. The talk highlights key product features such as creator profiles, trend tracking across platforms (YouTube, Vine, Facebook), and real‑time top‑video dashboards. Stern lists major customers (Comedy Central, Pepsi, Vice, HGTV, Warner Brothers, Playboy) and notes the company’s growth metrics (35 employees, $20 M raised). She also shares her personal background—from early video‑making, a stint at 20th Century Fox, business consulting, MBA, to working at YouTube—explaining how her media passion led to co‑founding Tubular. Throughout, she emphasizes the shifting media landscape away from traditional TV toward online video, the need for new measurement standards, and Tubular’s ambition to become the industry’s transparent, data‑driven standard.
Chapters
I was thinking about startups and especially sales since I've sort of done all the sales and marketing and biz dev and built that side of Tubular up. What is there to impart? And I think there's like 3 stages to sales at a startup. The first is like the hustle phase. The second is the process and standardization phase. And the last is the growth phase. And so Tubular is now 35 people and we sort of just entered the process phase, so I'm not that far out of the hustle phase. And so you guys are the hustle phase. So I think of the speakers that you're talking to, I may be closest to the hustle phase, and I'm not that far off from where you are today. So I thought I could talk a bit about that, as well as what the process phase looks like as well. And feel free to jump in with any questions. I— I'm gonna talk a bit about Tubular, who I am, and then open it up for questions, 'cause I much rather would hear what you guys have to say. So Tubular's the most widely used video intelligence service. And what that means is brands and media companies use our data to make better decisions about the content they're creating, how they're promoting it, and how they're tracking and optimizing it. And so our goal as a company is to be used by every single media company and to be sort of a video intelligence layer that everybody uses and creates content from. So, Tubular, my story, advice on sales and marketing, and then questions. I already told you all this, sorry. Hustle, process, grow. And yeah. So, I was going to show a video. Um, quickly about Tubular. I don't know if I can— if there's internet on this and I can— and I can do it.
Tubular helps people win at online video by not only understanding the views and the audience that gathered around the videos, but by understanding what they did after and how they responded to it. Online, there's hundreds of thousands of people now from newspapers, magazines and nonprofits and sports teams and leagues to individual creators, all creating different types of ads, different placements, different technologies shared on different social networks, and no one really knows what works. Everyone's flying blind. Tubular provides the data and the insights to make smarter decisions and execute them.
Our software brings a lot to the table. It is uniquely useful. I'm not working on something trivial. I'm working on something that makes a big difference to our consumers and to their jobs. That feels really good.
The people I'm working with are awesome, and everybody's really passionate about what they do. The fact that we're doing these cool things that not really anybody else is doing, it makes me feel really good. It makes me want to come into work and build out more features. I see the trajectory that we're on, and it's really exciting. Tubular is the place for me, you know, like it's where I belong.
OK. That's Tubular. I just figured we're not TaskRabbit, so just so you know we exist. There are people. And this video makes me happy just because building a company is awesome. And to actually see people who work there and that we have a little office dog, which is legit, and that we have customers and YouTube stars. And it's really exciting. So basically, that sort of gives you an overview of what Tubular is. The concept behind it is that— and you all know this more than anybody— video is changing, right? People are watching Vine, YouTube, Facebook. People are not watching TV. And in that very crowded, complicated, fragmented media universe, people like Nielsen, Comscore, they can't keep up anymore. And so a new sort of metric has to rise, a new standard. And that's what Tubular is trying to be. We were created to bring transparency and insights into this very complicated video universe. Today we're the largest database of video data. So that means I know every cat video that exists out there. And we are tracking about 200 million people and everything they do across YouTube. We've got a database with a billion videos, with millions of influencers, and it's all slice and diceable, filterable. You can track what's trending across Facebook or Vine. You can see What is it that mothers watch? What is it that millennials watch? We did a project for HGTV where we could say, home and garden, what does that mean to millennials? What are they watching? It's DIY. And who are the rising stars within DIY? And so we try and make sense of data for media companies to help them enter the future. And we work with a lot of big media companies today. So our customers are Comedy Central, Pepsi, Vice, HGTV. Last week we signed Warner Brothers, Playboy. And the company started about 3 years ago. And, you know, in the beginning, those sales were much harder. It was showing up with not much and trying to sell it and trying to get people on board. And then you pick up momentum and you pick up speed and it becomes easier and you're able to really grow a business. So today we're about 35 people. We've raised $20 million. And we have a lot of big customers that people have heard of. And we're continuing to grow from there. It's honestly just the start. And so we're trying to build, grow, get more and more customers, have more and more people hear about us, and really establish ourselves as a standard in the space. So just to show you a little bit about the products that we offer, I think Michelle Phan might even be coming to talk to you guys or already has. Yeah. So she's awesome. So an early user of Tubular. This is what we call our creator profile. So for 2 million creators, we have a resume page like this. You can see how many views they've had in the last month. So she had 18 million views, most of them on YouTube, some of them on Facebook. You can contact these influencers, reach out to them. And this is only possible through Tubular. It's amazing because, you know, until recently, no one had even in the mainstream media had heard of Michelle Phan, and she's more powerful than, you know, a TV show on CBS. Someone like PewDiePie, if you guys know about him. Fan over there. He has 400 million views a month, which is like insanity. So, when something like Big Bang Theory gets— has about like 23 million viewers, something like that. So, future is coming and Tubular is hoping to be a part of it. We also— oh, this is just to— this is fun. So, in the last 7 days, these are the top 3 videos that have been uploaded. So in the last 7 days, Tubular has collected 12 million new videos which have generated over 17 billion views. And number 1 is this dad. It got 53 million views. Has anyone seen this video yet?
No, it's awesome.
It's basically a dad and a kid who are like cranking this machine and this like whipped cream thing slaps them in their face. But it's mostly funny because they think it's the funniest thing on earth. Like they cannot stop laughing. It's not even that funny, but they think it's funny. And that's why it has 53 million views. Then there's the Star Wars trailer, 43 million views. And then there's actually a really inspiring video called Dear Future Generations, which is kind of a rap star guy talking about how he's sorry that there's no trees for you all. And so there's a call to action at the end to tell people to, you know, give back and think about the world and how you impact it. It's a really moving video. So 34 million views. So, this is a pretty accurate description of what's happening in online video. You have, like, whipped cream in the face trailers and moving videos as well. OK. Quickly, my story. So, this is the founding team of Tubular. I am— Rob, David, me. David's our VP of engineering. Rob's our CEO. I run our marketing and sales and biz dev. Quickly about my path. This— I don't know if this is interesting. I pulled some photos so you'd have something to look at. Always really passionate about media. So, like, this is a picture of me and my cousins, and we were this band of 4, and we would create videos. We'd just, like, run around with a video camera. And it started out the video cameras were, like, this big, and then they got smaller and smaller. And we always were making videos. I really wanted to be a filmmaker or a screenwriter, something in the media industry. I was really passionate about video. And I ran the TV station in college. I went out to LA and I did an internship at 20th Century Fox doing comedy series development, which was awesome, but it was mostly getting people their coffee. And so there was a business guy who was there and he said, hey, you seem like a smart person who's in college. Do you want to do something for me in between your coffee runs? And I was like, sure. And so he's like, let me— this is business development. This is business. I have an MBA. It's a really interesting way to be a part of the media industry. I was like, that is interesting. And I thought it was, you know, a cool way to have more impact and not just be getting people coffee. And so, in this picture of the lot at 20th Century Fox, this is the old New York set. And you can see New York and the palm trees. So then I thought, you know what, I'm gonna go into business consulting. And that's this like dark, sad behemoth of a building there in the dark. And I learned a lot and it was an awesome place. But pretty quickly I was like, what have I done? This is a terrible mistake. I need to find a way to get back to media and the things that I love. And so I sat down and I wrote a business school application. And the question was, what do you want to be in 5, 10, 15 years? What do you want to do with your life? And I wrote like 15 different options. I was like, I could do this, or I could do this, or I could do this. And I really didn't know what I wanted to do. And then at the end, I chose my favorite life, which was, I want to go to business school. I want to basically start a company that blends media, technology, and doing something innovative in the media space that pushes the media industry forward. And that's what I want to do. And it was a really choiceful decision to come out to the West Coast and try and start a company and try and do something in the media sphere that blended all my interests together. And yes, that's what I did. I went to business school. It was awesome. The— I traveled to 10 countries. I met interesting people. I learned a lot. And while I was there, I worked at YouTube. I ran the Future of Media Conference. I really sort of got into the media world. And then coming out of it, I wanted to start a company. And it's actually— it's funny. So TubeBuddy started 3 years ago. 4 years ago, I was in a space like this at like an incubator pitch competition pitching a totally separate business. Also in the media space, but different. And I got introduced to Rob, my co-founder. And he was like, I hear you're interested in media and technology as well. I'm thinking about creating Pro Tools for YouTubers. And I said, that's awesome. I worked at YouTube. I know that there's an opportunity for that. And he was like, join me as a co-founder. We'll launch this business. And I said, yeah, that sounds great. And so we did that about 3 years ago. 6 months later, we met our VP of engineering and launched the company.
